Neo-trad style red rose with dark green leaves and bold black outlines tattooed across the back of a hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red rose on the back of a hand

Neo-trad · Hand · Colour · Photo

A large open rose in shades of red and pink covers the back of the hand, with its petals shaded from deep crimson to pale highlights. Dark green leaves and a bud sit around the flower, all framed by thick black outlines. The colour ink dominates the image, and the rose is centred on the hand against a plain white sleeve.

Neo-trad Hand Rose Leaves Flower Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rose in the lower terrace at Caddenmoor opened only once every seven years, and the year it did, the royal gardener sent for me, a glazier's son with no business near the king's glasshouse. "Cut it at dawn," said Master Ashe, "before the crimson goes off it, and carry it to the chamber before the bell." I had cut glass all my life, so I knew how to hold a thing that could shatter.

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The glasshouse was hot as a bread oven and smelled of wet earth and iron. The bloom was the size of a cartwheel, its petals deep crimson at the heart and blushing pink at the rim, and the leaves beside it were dark as bottle glass. I took the stem through a leather cloth, minding the thorns, and felt it tremble as if it already knew where it was going.

In the chamber the queen was not on her throne but at the window, a grey shawl over her shoulders. She did not look at the flower. She looked at me. "Your father cut the last one," she said. "Did he tell you what it costs?" I said he had told me nothing except to keep my fingers clear of the thorns. She laughed, short and kind, and took the rose from me. "Then go home. The bell has already rung for the others."

When I reached the workshop, my father had set a sheet of ruby glass on the bench. He slid the cutter across without a word. The pattern was already scored into the surface: a crimson bloom with its outer petals pulled back, and the dark leaves curling beneath. It was the same flower I had carried up the hill, only this time the thorns had been left in.